Hand axes ruled us for 1 million years. Then we spoke. Now computer screens daily refashion our world. But reading comprehension is best when your personal digital media device is a hands-on relationship.

Our ancient ancestors made hand axes by cradling a stone in 1 hand and manipulating it with the other. The process required close involvement. It also required hand use. And so did fire making, sewing, etc. Such attention to detail relied on a specially evolved left-brain hemisphere. After 1 million years of hand-axe culture, we talked.

About 40 thousand years ago a part of the left-brain hemisphere began to recognize words well. And our new thinking system began just when the hand axe died out. Media theorist Marshal McLuhan stated: “Any innovation in technology modifies our relation to ourselves and to our bodies.” It’s possible a million-year-old relationship of hand axe manipulation flipped into complex speech. Comprehending words and comprehending tools both require a specialized left-brain hemisphere. And like tool use, word-use may require hands.

Stimming is subconsciously using hands while using words while under stress. For example, people in awkward conversations fidget. Hair straightening, thumb twiddling, finger drumming, pencil tapping, doodling, spinning an object, and repetitive pulling on clothing can also be subconscious attempts to relieve word-stress through physical manipulation.

Reading long lines of text is like stimming because they both require words and even hands. Books get cradled, their pages felt, turned, and flipped. Newspapers get ruffled, folded, and held close. Even their smell can sooth. We get intimacy from using a medium we can firmly hold and study up close.

Credit: Sunshine music

Reading on a computer screen however is difficult because you don’t get a good enough tactile relationship: you can hold it but not well; you can’t easily flip pages, feel texture, or even smell it. Without hand involvement, mental stress from reading builds. We don’t like reading off mediums to which our bodies can’t form.

Accordingly, media theorist Marshal McLuhan stated:

“…the more frequently and fluently a medium is used, the more ‘transparent’ or ‘invisible’ to its users it tends to become…Indeed, it is typically when the medium acquires transparency that its potential to fulfill its primary function is greatest.”

Although a study found that reading comprehension with digital text is similar to reading comprehension with paper text, the study director declared:

On computer screen reading comprehension, 1 concept per page is important because digital screens stimulate your right-brain hemisphere. Your right-brain hemisphere comprehends all written information at once, in an instant. Words on digital screens should therefore act like pictures. It’s a “poetic experience”. Here’s reasoning:

According to communications theorist Walter Ong, his following article, which I greatly edited for the purpose of this post, speaks of something he calls “poetic knowledge:”

“…Imitation must have to do with form, and form is precisely that by which we know…material things…If we take the instance of a piece of music…and examine that which makes it a one thing, we find that…the wholeness and completeness of the work, is unexpressible in philosophical statement…The only way to know our concerto is to listen to it. What is true of music in this sense is true of all the other fine arts…The Greeks called what we call fine arts ‘imitative arts’…The work of fine art as we know it when we know it most thoroughly: to take a particular instance, that particular something that we take away with us from a performance of Othello and which we do not know from any other play, but from Othello alone.”

This thing is the very heart of the work…

“We must not allow our discussion to become entangled in the more proximate truths which the words of such a play represent to us: the truths of the individual judgments which make up the actors’ speeches, or even the truths which is the story itself, but we must cling to this deeper principle of unity which makes the work a one…’Poetic experience,…poetic knowledge that seems in immediate contact with the real’…This thing which is the artistic whole,…is a thing which is originally met with in nature. From nature the same characteristic kind of knowledge is had…’Knowledge that seems in immediate contact with the real’…A thing constructed of a manifold of forms, a truth arising out of a richness of truths…The artist has deliberately catered to our capabilities and calculatingly seeks to bring out certain forms which he knows will produce the desired effect and to suppress others which are irrelevant…He judges by the effect and…whether the work is properly done or not…Of poetic knowledge of natural things there is a more than ordinary contact with truth…In poetic knowledge there is a single reality which is cognized…It is precisely this thing that is the imitation in the case of fine arts… (Ong)”

Web writing can be seen as a fine art because it speaks to the right-brain hemisphere; web writing is poetic; web writing is the HEART of the message.

Writing and writing and writing does not make a good writer, at least not a good digital wordsmith. Writing teachers often say that to be a good writer, one must write a lot. They’ll say go home and write; write about anything; but just write. If you practice a bad habit over and over again, the bad habit, your newly developed bad habit, will be a part of you. You then should become a natural at displaying your bad habit, your awful nature. Recognizing and ridding your bad habit, consequently, may be stressful. Practicing digital writing should be a study of good digital writing, first.

You may even then recognize that “writer” does not apply well, that “communicating with words” better describes this process. “Writing” might connote long lines; but “communicating with digital words,” or “digital wordsmithing,” etc, might better connote carefully selected objects, specifically placed, and for a specific purpose.

Bonexpose.com

There is no place for pomp in an online environment. It’s not about the writer, their style, and a captive audience. Communicating with digitized words requires a tremendous feel for your readers, a freed public who knows they are in charge, who demands respect. Give your online tribe, those who follow your communicating, not what you want them to know, but what they really desire, for their plan-of-things.

fourc.ca

It is difficult to trap people when they have choices. In a digital environment, you may see how “writer” could be replaced with something like “one who communicates with words, etc.”

The Public and its Problems, John Dewey, 1927 (was available for free online at http://www.archive.org until recently, as it has mysteriously become unavailable. Book described how to ((in our now digitized era)) flatten our hierarchical government).

An informavore with new insight, you might also create and publish your own ideas, thus becoming an authority.

Please experience following video suggesting how, theoretically, your life will change by using an RSS reader. The speaker is Professor Cory Anton of the Media Ecology Association, and the following video is from his personal website.

“Since it is the left hemisphere that normally posesses the natural language and speech mechanisms, all processes ongoing in the left hemisphere could easily be verbally described by the patients; information presented to the right hemisphere went undescribed.““Review of the Split Brain,“ in The Human Brain, M.C. Wittrock, p. 91.

you would read it all. You as a test subject would give the required effort and understand it all, no matter how discouraging it seems. But the before mentioned experiment, in its context, was not reality.

In the real world you would more likely have either went to another website or gave it a very brief scan because electronic reading devices require more human effort than does paper:

Almost all of the participants stated that they liked reading a printed book best,

stated a director and designer of the study.

Imagine walking on a flat surface and suddenly appears a hill. Walking it requires greater effort, so you investigate alternate routes. It’s like reading web material. The world seems fine but after going online you encounter a page full of text and there’s no way you’re reading it.